Podcast audiobook downloads are WAY down, dropping 40% to 60% for nearly all titles over the last three months. My total podcast downloads has been dropping all summer, by up to 21% each month, and after dropping at a slower rate per month over the spring is fully 64% lower than at its peak in December of 2009. The 3 new audiobooks I’ve released since then have not helped much to offset this trend, contributing less than 5% to the total downloads so far this year.
Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB
- Lost and Not Found: 49 / 457 / 18
- Dragons’ Truth: 98 / 572 / 55
- Forget What You Can’t Remember: 104 / 1,765 / 51
- Untrue Tales… Book One: 69 / 1,594 / 134
- Untrue Tales… Book Two: 76 / 1,852 / 122
- Untrue Tales… Book Three: 55 / 877 / 94
- Cheating, Death: 6 / 2,988 / 197
- Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 2 / 260 / 37
- More Lost Memories (full): 2 / 362 / 39
- More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 0
- Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 1 / 943 / N/A
- Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 1
- Total for all titles: 463 / 11,670 / 747
- Total YTD: 4552 / 174,653 / 12,031
- Total all-time: 12,974 / 354,754 / 23,150
Free eBook downloads have remained relatively flat all year, much more stable than during either 2008 or 2009. eBook sales, actual paid sales, are still small enough that a shift from selling four or five to selling three in a month is not statistically relevant. I sold 3 eBooks in September, one copy of Untrue Tales… Book Three on kindle, one copy of Cheating, Death at Smashwords, and one copy of the TeaTA short story Oracular Offspring at Smashwords. (I also had 10 free/coupon eBook downloads at Smashwords, half of them Cheating, Death.) That makes for $8.78 from my cut of eBooks sales in September. Wheee, the kindle 70% royalty makes a big difference – & is now also coming to me from UK sales (none of which I’ve ever/yet made).
I forgot to mention it last month, but since it’s happened 2 months in a row: I also sold 2 paperback copies of Cheating, Death via wholesale/LSI in each of August and September. I net $2.44/copy, so that’s $4.88/month or $9.76 for all four. While looking that up, I noticed that in June I sold 2 copies of Forget What You Can’t Remember via wholesale/LSI, earning $4.50. Not sure where these sold, exactly, but probably not Amazon, where their sales ranks are in the multi-millions (and could drop into the hundreds of thousands with just a couple copies moving per month, from what I hear); maybe book stores I’ve never heard of (or a certain horror book store I have) are shelving/selling them.
I should ask. *scoots off, sends a DM* If an actual bookstore is shelving/selling my zombie book, I’ll keep the discount at 50% indefinitely, rather than follow my new plan of dropping the discount to 20% after the book has been out a year. *twiddles thumbs* *waits for DM reply* Because really, yes, it’s still cool that a bookstore ever voluntarily shelved my book. The ~$3 more/copy I’d get from online stores doesn’t seem worth the cost of removing it from a physical bookstore, especially if it’s actually selling there. Plus, as an author, a reader, and a publisher, I’d rather do something nice for an indie bookstore who was willing to do business with me than to do something that was only intended to bring in more money from online bookstore sales. As you may have noticed, I almost always prefer doing something nice over making money.
In other news, I just finished writing Untrue Tales… Book Four. Now I just need to read, edit, re-read & copyedit, share with my Beta Readers & incorporate their feedback, design a cover, write copy, and do eBook layout & conversion for it. While writing Book Five. Before the end of the month. So I can write Book Six for NaNoWriMo. (because I’m crazy)
